


my life is a candle and a wick

by Aramley



Category: Spartacus Series (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-09
Updated: 2013-10-09
Packaged: 2017-12-28 23:18:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/998102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aramley/pseuds/Aramley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We had thought you gone from this world," Naevia says, smiling through her tears when finally Mira wakes. Later, she will hear the scene of her injury described and it will become like a strange memory of a thing known yet unseen: her mind's eye supplying her the sight of her body limp in Spartacus' arms and her blood staining his hands. The true memory stops at the moment of the axe's impact - from then until she opens eyes in the medicus' tent and joins the living once more it is all a blank.</p><p> </p><p>Mira in War of the Damned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my life is a candle and a wick

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Spartacus Reverse Big Bang and inspired by slightly/suthnoli's beautiful Mira fanmix _Do Your Weeping Now_ , which you can listen to [here](http://open.spotify.com/user/suthnoli/playlist/5wQOxdwVxdsT4JVCQwR0ox) and definitely should because it's amazing.
> 
> Thanks to meretricula, who is as always the better half of my brain <333

**i.** _Our hearts didn't come together  
But I saw the two collide _

"We had thought you gone from this world," Naevia says, smiling through her tears when Mira finally wakes. Later, she will hear the scene of her injury described and it will become like a strange memory of a thing known yet unseen: her mind's eye supplying her the sight of her body limp in Spartacus' arms and her blood on his hands. The true memory stops at the moment of the axe's impact - from then until she opens eyes in the medicus' tent and joins the living once more it is all a blank.

"You are lucky," the camp doctor tells her, kindly. "A little higher, a little lower; if Roman aim were truer you would not be here. The gods are kind."

The gods may have intended it a kindness to keep her among the living, but in those first days of pain she hardly feels it so, and when it becomes plain to her how the weeks of illness and fever have wasted her she comes to think of it as a cruelty instead.

The first time she lifts bow again it feels impossibly heavy in her hands and when she tries to tense the string her shoulder screams, arm trembling so that even if she could draw it would take another miracle to hit anything smaller than the broadside of a temple. Tears well up suddenly - she had loved the bow from the moment she first loosed arrow under Lucius' tutelage, relished the feel of her whole self narrowing to that deadly force of draw and release. It feels like a bereavement, added to other bereavements. She has lost Spartacus, she has lost her strength; she has lost everything that gave her purpose.

"What use can I be if I cannot wield bow as I did?" she asks Naevia, her breath shuddering out of her suddenly in hitched sobs. Naevia reaches for her hand and holds it tightly, as if pressing her own strength into Mira.

"You will regain strength," she says, with certainty. Since the mountaintop there is new steel in her, and if sometimes the shadow of the old fear darkens her eye she turns it to the slaughter of Romans - a pursuit in which she has developed astonishing skill. "And if you never took up weapon again, it would make you no less valuable to the cause. Clear eye and true aim does not require bow and arrow."

"You are an oracle now, then," Mira says. She blots her tears away with the heel of her free hand, struggling out a watery laugh.

"It requires no oracle to see worth where it is plain," says Naevia, smiling. She steps closer and draws Mira in to press their foreheads together, her words whispered into the space between them. "You helped give strength when all I had was gone. Now at last I have strength to repay favour."

 

 **ii.** _It hits deeper  
it does me no harm, harm_

When she is well enough again to move out of the medicus' tent and into her own and to move around the camp once again she is surprised at how many people seem to know her. They share their food and their work and their cares, until finally it dawns upon her: people come to her because the belief persists that she is Spartacus' woman, and that soft words from her lips will move the great man. 

"They should not lay care upon you," Spartacus says, when she brings their concerns to him. His eyes skim across hers in the careful way they are wont to do now. They alight for a moment and dart away. She wonders if when he looks at her too closely he sees the image she can only imagine: her body in his arms. "Your strength should be kept for your own health, not the cares of an army."

"Spartacus," she says, kindly, because he is so preoccupied with military matters he might be forgiven not seeing what has been growing in front of him for months. "We no longer stand an army."

He pauses, so that for once his gaze settles on hers and holds. He seems surprised by her words. "What are we, if not that?"

What are they? They are fighting men and women, and they are those who have never lifted weapon to task in their lives and are ill-fitted to take them up now. House-slaves, bed-slaves, farm-hands, kitchen-children; those broken past anything but the hope of freedom and those yet too young to understand the word slave. They are the sick as well as the strong. They are hungry bellies and a powerful thirst, shivers in the cold nights. They are ten thousand needs large and small, the smallest as pressing as the largest to the one who bears it.

She permits herself an indulgent smile. "We are your people," she says. "We are a city."

He looks skeptical. 

"Let me be useful to you," she says. She's afraid that she sounds desperate, but then, she is. She misses him - she loves him. If she cannot have his heart then she will have his friendship; if she cannot offer him her body then she will offer her counsel.

"I have always valued your advice," Spartacus says, sounding at least as though he means it truly. His face darkens. "When you fell on the mountain, I feared - I did not think I could bear your loss."

"I am not lost," Mira says. "Do I not yet stand before you?"

She has never doubted that he loves her, in the manner in which he is able to love any woman now. She senses for the first time that they can be something else to each other, perhaps something more than friends but less than lovers. She can help him, and the cause. She wants it. 

 

 **iii.** _And my bat lightning heart  
Wants to fly away_

She cannot pretend to feel much in the way or sympathy or sorrow for the slaughtered Romans of Sinuessa, but for all that it is a terrible thing to see: the chambers which should have stored sacks of grain now piled with the dead, and limp Roman bodies hooked where fat haunches of meat should have hung. At first she feels sick but, as with most terrible things, the horror fades.

The men drag the bodies in and she scatters them with thick layers of salt to halt the rot until they can be better disposed of - burned or buried as time allows. Her sandals slip in Roman blood as she picks delicately between the stacked corpses. It is hard to remember that the limp white hands held whips to flay the backs of slaves, and that mouths slack and foolish in death once issued orders that blighted lives. Death strips away the monster.

Blood drips onto her cheek from a hanging body and she startles, swearing softly. Nasir looks up from where he's engaged in a similar task and smiles briefly.

"Even free we are yet cleaning up their mess," she says, wiping the blood away with the flat of her hand. "I fear we shall never be rid of the stench."

"There is one thing I miss from former life," Nasir says, catching her eye in quiet conspiracy.

"Baths," they say together, and then share laughter between them. There is no-one else she can speak to of things such as these - no-one else, it sometimes feels, who yet remembers a time of status and borrowed luxury, a time when the burden of slavery had not weighed so heavily on them.

"It seems so long since I last saw a bath," Mira says, sighing and pushing back her hair with one hand. Her fingers tangle in strands clogged with blood and sweat and she grimaces.

"Hot water," Nasir says, teasing even as he nudges a body to lie more neatly against another. "Neck deep, and steam rising."

"Oil and strigil," Mira returns, and they share an exaggerated groan of longing for luxuries passed long out of reach. 

"My dominus laid in imported scents from the markets in Capua," Nasir confides. "The price could have fed our army on the march."

"I would welcome any scent that covered that of fucking Roman stink," says Mira, on a sigh. She collects herself, shaking away thoughts of bathwater and cleansing steam, of her body scraped clean of grime and scented with rose or iris - dabs of solid perfume on her throat and breasts when she was presented to guests. She throws another thick handful of salt over stacked bodies, thinking, if you had put it to me while I was massaging oil into domina's skin that there would come a time that found me ankle-deep in blood, clearing up the aftermath of a massacre, I should without doubt have thought you mad.

 

 **iv.** _And though they do say, life is forgiving,  
what use is life to those who aren't living?_

Months have passed since her injury and she can draw the bowstring almost taut, the torn muscles of her shoulder ache and protest but they do, at last, her bidding. The bow is not yet a full-sized one as she could manage before - it is fitted more for a child than for a grown woman, but there is surprising power in the recurved design and the arrow, when she looses it, flies true. Every draw is harder than the one before it, but it seems now that every day she can draw a little further, or manage one more shot, or find a mark closer to the centre of her makeshift target.

"Why you do not practice with other warriors?" a voice behind her calls, and she startles. Her arrow looses before time and buries itself in the ground a foot before the target. Mira growls under her breath.

She turns, glowering. "You distracted me."

"Make no apology," Saxa says, grinning. "Would Roman shits say sorry for disturb shot?"

"I am hardly shooting at Romans," Mira says, and goes to retrieve her arrows.

"You avoid question," says Saxa. "Why you do not train with other warriors?"

"I am no warrior," Mira returns. "I seek only to regain strength that was lost."

Saxa watches her as she plucks arrows from her target, which is just an upended tree-stump with a dented Roman helmet serving in place of a head. She leaves the shot that Saxa interrupted for last, throwing her an evil look as she drags the arrow out of the ground with a vicious pull.

"I remember you fight well," Saxa says. "You fight with passion, if without much skill."

"Your words make heart long again for sword in hand," Mira says sarcastically, turning her back to Saxa and fitting the misfired arrow back to the string. She has the shot lined up perfectly when she feels Saxa's body press hot along her back, her chin hooking onto Mira's shoulder and her hands coming round to rest on the mostly-bare skin of her stomach. 

Saxa's breath is hot against her ear, laced with amusement. "Now I make more distraction?"

"You make effort," Mira says, dryly. She draws the string as tight as she can over her shoulder's sharp protests. This last one, this last shot. 

"Aim for cock," Saxa breathes. Her smile curves against . "Imagine it is cock of Spartacus."

Mira looses the arrow unthinking, instinct only keeping her from jerking away from Saxa's hands on her body.

"You speak of things you do not understand," she says, when she is finally free.

"Understand enough," Saxa says, with one eyebrow lasciviously quirked. "Understand man and women, no?"

Mira looks back at the tree stump and the arrow stuck fast where, on a real man, her shot might have severed manhood from body. It is possible, she concedes privately, that Saxa may have a point.

 **vi.** _broken hearts and broken bones  
stumble on the stepping stones_

Although it is meant to be an occasion for joy, there is a tangible undercurrent of sadness which runs beneath the revel the night before the army divides itself. Mira moves through it feeling strangely disconnected from the others. Spartacus has disappeared, so has Laeta: one hardly needs to strain for the meaning. Crixus and Naevia keep quietly to themselves. Between Agron and Nasir something has passed to darken mood. Even Saxa is subdued, although the reason is clear to be seen. Still, Mira thinks she has the best chance of rescuing her own evening with Saxa, and so she makes for her, finding her a little detached from the crowds and fixed on Gannicus and Sibyl.

"Apologies," Mira says, distracting her by means of a well-timed cup of wine. Saxa wordlessly drains the cup already in her hand with a quick, fierce movement and reaches for the full one.

"Gratitude," she says, though for wine or sympathy isn't clear; perhaps both.

"She is a little thing," Saxa muses, after a period of uncharacteristic quiet. She glances over again at Gannicus and Sybil tucked close together. From this angle Gannicus' back gives protection from prying eyes, though when he shifts to drink it is possible then to see Sybil's pale upturned face, the brightness of her smile and the light in her eyes visible even across the room. Saxa drains the second cup of wine, decisively.

"No time for little things," she says, turning to Mira with a big, brilliant grin and a hand already reaching out to fit the curve of her waist. Mira's stomach jumps under the touch and Saxa's smile goes sharper, her eyes darker. Her hand shifts up, slowly, tracing the indentations of ribs under the thin material of Mira's dress before cupping a breast in a hot, rough palm. Mira freezes, while under the touch her body seems to be flaring into life. Her heart takes flight. How long has it been since someone touched her to please, touched from desire?

Saxa's thumb sweeps once across the smooth skin between Mira's breasts, pressing lust into her sternum. "No?"

Mira's breath hitches. "Yes," she says, and reaches up.

In an empty chamber, the sound of their laughter layers over the sounds of the revel outside continuing without them. Saxa presses hot kisses to her throat, her breasts, bites them into the soft skin of her inner thighs. Mira's lain with women before - knows how to give pleasure and has given it absent the desire to please - but now she employs all her knowledge and laughs when Saxa's breath hitches, when she gives shocked little gasps against Mira's throat. 

When dawn's light finds them Mira blinks awake slowly. They are a tangle of limbs, an arm and a leg thrown across Mira to keep her in place, Saxa's warm stomach pressed against Mira's back. Mira smiles and spits out strands of smokey gold hair, and Saxa huffs out a beery sigh against Mira's neck and mutters something low and profane, harsh Germanic edges slur-softened. Mira grins into her hair and settles again, peacefully; shuts her eyes and sleeps.

 

 **vii.** _the killing floor_

"Come hunting with me," Mira says, pausing at Nasir's tent on her way into the woods. With the removal of most of the warriors, much camp-work of this kind has fallen again to the women who have been left behind. It is not yet dawn but Nasir is already awake and poking restlessly at his camp-fire. His eyes are tired when he looks up, as though he has passed another disturbed night.

"I'm needed for training," he says, but she waves his protest away.

"We will be returned by midday if all goes well," Mira says. "And if we return bearing the animal I have in my sights, it will be a hero's welcome. Will you leave a poor weak woman bear her bounty all alone?"

He grumbles, but rises to follow and she rewards him with a brilliant grin. The land offers poor hunting for the most part, but there is a good-sized stag she has glimpsed on several other trips and she is sure that she can bring him down. Besides, the great draw of the woods are their quiet and solitude and, for Nasir, the distraction from thoughts of Agron.

The hunt proves successful, and within a few hours she brings down the stag she wanted.

"Diana herself could not have shot more cleanly," Nasir says, giving her a victorious squeeze while she grins. Nasir lifts the dead beast onto one shoulder, steadying it with one strong hand.

"Now," she says, as they walk back slowly the way they came, no longer hushed with stealth but cracking twigs blithely underfoot. "Unburden your heart."

Nasir is quiet for more long moments before he speaks, and when he does he doesn't speak of Agron directly.

"When I was slave, I knew only duty," Nasir says, slowly. "Never desire. How was it with you?"

"But once," says Mira, thinking of Spartacus in his cell and how her heart had stirred within her, like a bird testing wings for first flight. Nasir's sideways look says that he guesses as much the subject of her desire.

"You love him, I know," Nasir says. "Yet you left him. How did you do it?"

His tone is thoughtful. Mira is not sure whether she is taking the role of Agron, who left, or Nasir, who must learn to live without him. She suspects the comparison does none of them any favour.

"The cases are not alike," she says, with forced lightness. "It was not lack of love that drove Agron from your side."

"Result stands same," Nasir says, with a sting of bitterness that makes her heart ache. "We are parted, perhaps -" he stops abruptly, as though the words are stuck in his throat and refuse to be spoken: perhaps forever.

She reaches for his free hand and tangles her fingers with his, returning the grateful squeeze he gives her with a reassuring pressure of her own.

"The gods are sometimes kind," she says, knowing it to be useless advice even as the words pass her lips, yet she says it with love and hopes in her heart that it is true.

 

 **viii.** _oh! alas, i am in love  
and cannot not speake it_

It is on the long, slow march away from the mountain that Spartacus takes her elbow and drawn her to one side of the column.

"I would ask favour," he says.

"Only speak and see it done," she says, concerned. 

Glancing down, he smiles briefly. "Do not trouble yourself," he says. "It is no difficult thing I would ask. Merely turn eye to Laeta. It is a hard thing to find self torn from previous life."

No difficult thing. Perhaps he sees her faltering expression. He continues, "I would not ask you to shoulder burden. Merely to help her bear her own."

Mira swallows a glut of unkind words crowding her throat. Laeta is a Roman. It is not weeks since she stood domina to some who are yet among the rebels. And a private hurt: it has not escaped her that Spartacus and Laeta have been together often - that she has seen his eye follow her and hers turn to him in a way she recognises. Her heart has healed in the months since their parting, but it still feels the sting of jealousy.

"I will give such aid as I can," she says, finally, and Spartacus presses her shoulder in gratitude before he leaves her to her unwelcome task.

She has never shied from difficult task, and she finds Laeta easily in the crowds - her fine gown and pretty curls marking her, as does the slowness of her pace and the difficulty with which she carries the pack she had been allocated. Never a day's work, Mira thinks to herself; she is used to people like us bearing her burdens.

Laeta glances sideways at her, then back down at the slow progress of her fine sandals on the muddy track ahead. "I do not require pity."

"You are fortunate, then," Mira says, suddenly irritable, "as I have none to offer you."

"You dislike me," says Laeta. She pauses to wipe sweat from her forehead, pushing dishevelled curls back into her ruined hairstyle. Her eyes are smudged with kohl, dark tear-tracks still visible on umblemished cheeks. "Simply because I am Roman. Even though I now stand as one of you." 

Her eyes dart down to the livid mark on her arm, and Mira's follow. Does the mark make them equal? She thinks, one does not become something entirely different with a simple press of iron to flesh. Once Mira had told herself that her life had begun with the escape from Batiatus' ludus, that she had created herself in the moment of slitting the guard's throat - that like the goddesses of myth she had sprung fully-formed from the spray of his blood and breath. It is a comforting fiction, but it is a fiction all the same. Her freedom now does not erase the years she spent in slavery, as Laeta's new status as slave cannot erase the years she spent as domina, kind or no.

"If Spartacus sent you, you may tell him that I am not helpless fucking child," Laeta snaps, with a flash of wounded pride that jars Mira's patience further. She sets her jaw and holds a hand out for Laeta's pack.

"What Spartacus asks I am not bound to obey as slave to master's voice. My kindness is offered freely. If you are to become one of us, you will learn that our strength is shared," Mira says, rather enjoying Laeta's startled look. "Take help now, so that in time to come you may offer it in return."

 

 **ix.** _herstory of glory_

Kore is shaking, triumphant, her arm twisted in Caesar's hand. Her eyes have a frenzied glitter where they light on the body felled by her hands. 

"Mad bitch," Caesar spits, viciously. "What makes you think Crassus gives shit about a runaway slave?"

"He will," Kore says. She turns to Spartacus. "I believe that he will hold my life equal to those you would see returned to you."

Spartacus' face is set. Already Laeta's hand is on his arm, saying, you cannot let her do it. But Mira can see that the decision is made: in whatever regard Crassus might hold Kore's life, it is nothing to Spartacus' desire to see his people returned. 

"Let her ready herself," Mira says. "Will you send her to Crassus yet stained with blood of son?"

They all turn to look at her. Caesar's look of contempt, Laeta's betrayal, Kore's blank exultant stare. Spartacus inclines his head in agreement. 

"You do not have to do this," Laeta says, low and quick in the seclusion of Spartacus' tent as soon as they are in the tent and out of Caesar's earshot. "He will kill you."

"I do not believe he will," Kore says, distantly. "I have hope - if he loves me as he did -"

She is shaking too much to wash her own hands so they do it for her, Laeta the left and Mira the right, sluicing away the sticky red blood of Crassus' son. The water is cold. Mira feels as though she is preparing a corpse for burial.

Laeta runs on, speaking nonsense, and Mira is reminded again that at heart she will always be Roman. 

"If my life must be forfeit, it is not too high a price for his," Kore says, finally. She shuts her eyes and smiles, looking distant and divine, like a carving of a goddess. "Thank the gods at least that it could be by my hand."

There is blood beneath her fingernails, ground in deep. Mira works at it ungently, conscious of Spartacus and Caesar waiting outside and hoping for the sake of all those lost yet living that Kore's life weighed heavier in Crassus' scales than theirs. 

Strange, she thinks uncharitably, that Laeta, a Roman, is so uncomfortable with the idea that life can be bartered. Is life for life so different from coin for life?

"Her dress," Laeta murmurs. "Do you have another? He cannot see his son's blood staining her."

Kore looks down, as though only in that moment realising that she is stained and spattered with Tiberius' blood. 

"What terrible things love drives us to," she says, low and tremulous. 

Mira remembers that once, for love, she put her hands around the throat of a pregnant woman. For love, she would have crushed the life from her and the child in her belly - for love, Roman or no, she would have done a terrible thing, and not regretted it. 

"We cannot choose who we love," Laeta says, softly. Her eye catches Mira's and then skims away, chasing the ripples across the surface of the water. 

"No, we cannot," Mira says. She looks up at Kore, and their gazes catch and hold - she feels an understanding pass between them. "But there are many things we can."

 **x.** _Pick up your rope Lord, sling it to me,  
if we are to battle I must not be weak._

"You will lead the group across the mountains," Spartacus tells her. "You will see our people to freedom."

Mira balks. "Agron -"

"Agron will stand at my side," Spartacus says. One corner of his mouth quirks in a tired half-smile. "It would appear that it takes more than Roman iron to keep sword from German hand."

"Aided by Syrian mettle, no doubt," Mira says, returning the half-smile to cover a private flush of affection and grief. "And yet point stands: I am no warrior. Should the Romans fall on us I cannot raise sword to protect them, and of those in that party there are few who could."

"If battle fails, a thousand warriors would not protect them," says Spartacus. "Warriors will stand small use to them on the road ahead. They will need a leader."

"You are their leader," Mira says.

"I may not - " Spartacus says, and then stops abruptly. The rest of his sentence does not need to be spoken aloud for Mira to hear it: _I may not be there_. He turns and bends over the map spread out on the table-top. His fingers trace a whisper-light path through the mountains, his eyes following it distantly, as though looking at something he desires but knows he will never have. "You will lead them this way, through the mountains. It will be a hard road; they will look to you for their strength."

She learned to read as a child, and she follows the line of his thought through the Roman lands and beyond - Cisalpine Gaul, and Germania east of the Rhine where the Romans do not yet hold sway. All roads lead outwards, away from Rome. He flattens his palm over free lands, pressing down as though by force of will he might feel them under his touch.

Chasing an impulse, Mira steps closer and covers his hand with both of hers. When they were lovers she had dreamed often of his large hands on her body, their strength concealing an unexpected gentleness; even now she loves their strength, their certainty. She lets her hands cover his and her body rest against the hard, tense line of him, her warm side pressing the length of his arm where he leans over the table, head bowed a little. The rough homespun of his cloak scratches against her cheek, but the smell is familiar and she breathes it in, indulging herself for a long moment.

"Nothing that has come to pass would have been if it were not for you," Spartacus says. His voice is low, rough, matched to the soft light and the quiet, which is like the hush of an indrawn breath. "You did not turn from me when I could not love you as you deserve. You have been a dear friend, loyal companion, trusted general. My heart tells me that you will lead our people to freedom."

"Stop," she breathes, voice thick and tears burning behind her eyes. It's too much like a goodbye. "You speak as though battle were decided before single blow struck."

He doesn't answer. He lets her lean against him for long heartbeats, letting her rest on his strength one last time, and then finally shifts. His free hand presses hers briefly before he brings it up to turn her face to his, and for a heart-soaring second she thinks he might kiss her as he once would - that they might lie together one last time on the eve of battle. But Spartacus tilts her face to press his lips to her forehead, and then releases her with a smile.

 **xi.** _all you loved of him lies here,  
do your weeping now_

It is spring, a clear bright day with the promise of coming heat and for the first time Mira's short Germanic cloak feels heavy as she works in the afternoon sunshine. It is the last thing to ready before planting, this small vegetable plot that the houses of their makeshift village will share between them. The work is easy and she lets her mind wander.

Days like these, flashes of memory come back like beads on a chain. She sees Gannicus embracing Sibyl for the last time - gentle Sibyl, who thought for weeks afterwards that she carried his child in her belly and wept when the body made a liar of hope. 

She thinks of the way that Saxa had kissed her goodbye, hard and joyful, flashing a grin of white teeth over her shoulder as she walked away to take her place in the ranks. She was spoiling for a fight, vibrating with leashed violence. The sunlight caught her hair in a shock of tarnished gold.

She thinks of Naevia at the end, fierce and calm, the crushing strength of her final embrace and the determination with which she released Mira. Her grip on Mira's shoulders had been bruising, and she had pressed their foreheads together and whispered, "Live," into the space between them. Her grip had been bruising but her hands were cold, like those of a woman already dead. 

She thinks of Spartacus most of all.

A touch on her shoulder startles her back to herself, and she looks up to find Agron standing over her, smiling gently.

"You were far from here," he says, settling himself gingerly onto the ground beside her.

"I was," she agrees, but doesn't elaborate - they both knew where she was. A rocky outcrop, a mound of stones, a red serpent standing final sightless watch. She sees the shadow of the same image in his eyes.

"Give me that," he says, gesturing for the small digging tool. "Nasir has gone to the village, and I may as well do something of fucking use."

Although healed now Agron is still touchy about his injured hands, though by effort and ingenuity he finds means to manage all but the most intricate or effortful work. The soil is loose and it takes little effort to dig the furrows into it; he works and lets her sit and watch, the silence between them easy and companionable.

"Sometimes he comes to me in dreams," Agron says, after a while has passed in this manner. "I see him standing in the doorway of our hut. Or in the goat-pen, laughing at me. Agron, from East of the Rhine, he says, herder of goats. Fucking laughing."

Mira laughs as well, though the image pricks tears and suddenly the grief rises, twisting her beyond control. Agron sits quietly digging furrows for seeds while she bends forward in pain, while she stifles sobs with an earth-stained hand and gradually forces her breath to slow. Afterwards her face feels swollen and hot, but the chaos inside has gone blessedly quiet. 

"It is done," Agron says, meaning the seed-furrows or perhaps her weeping or perhaps something else entirely. He sets the trowel aside. "Pass seeds."

They work together for this part, Mira pouring seeds into the furrows and Agron scooping earth down onto them, patting it level with the sides of his hands or the flat of his wrists. The seeds now planted will burst roots down into the ground, ripening with the summer suns and rains, and in the autumn they will harvest them to be shared between them: Mira, Agron and Nasir, Laeta, Sybil, and all the rest of the surviving rebels who chose to band together in this new place to put roots into the ground and share new life together.

"I think he is laughing because he is happy," she says, suddenly. Beside her Agron struggles to his feet, brushing soil from his tunic. He clears his throat brusquely but says nothing, just offers her his arm, and she lets herself be pulled up.


End file.
